At first glance, Northwest Peak Lookout is not much to look at.

Nearly a century of solitary confinement at 7,700 feet of elevation has worn the one-room structure down to a brittle-boned skeleton. The shutters sit skewed, and the walls waver. If not for the steel cables that tether it to the mountainside, the lookout may well have fallen to total ruin long ago.

“But it's here and it's pretty cool,” said Peter Kitts.

Astride a lichen-encrusted rock outside the lookout’s doorstep, the 75-year-old Yaak resident paused to appreciate the ramshackle lookout before turning his attention outward. That was Mount Henry Lookout, explained Kitts as he pointed southeast, where a distant mountain nosed its way into the sky. He had been stationed there as a fire lookout during the summer of 1984. Kit

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